Gore's Inconvenient Truth

his sabotage of environmentalism while Vice President

Glover Park Group Fights for (and Against) Climate Protection
Source: Washington Post, March 31, 2008
"Former vice president Al Gore (through his Alliance for Climate Protection) will launch a three-year, $300 million campaign aimed at mobilizing Americans to push for aggressive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, a move that ranks as one of the most ambitious and costly public advocacy campaigns in U.S. history. ... The climate alliance's initiative, however, will not go unchallenged by climate change skeptics. Americans for Balanced Energy Choices, a nonprofit funded by the coal industry and its allies, is spending about $35 million this election to bolster support for coal-generated electricity. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank that receives part of its funding from oil and gas companies" is attacking Gore. Meanwhile, the Glover Park Group must be laughing all the way to the bank. The public relations firm is working for Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, and also for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers against automobile fuel efficiency standards. For GPG, it's all about billable hours.

"air pollution from waste incinerators typically includes dioxins,
furans, and pollutants like arsenic, cadmium, chlorobenzenes, chlorophenols,
chromium, cobalt, lead, mercury, PCBs, and sulfur dioxide. ... municipal
waste incinerators are now the most rapidly growing source of mercury
emissions into the atmosphere. .... [It] creates a new solid waste problem
that is in some ways worse than the one we have now."
-- Al Gore's book "Earth in the Balance" pp. 156-157

"The very idea
of putting WTI in a flood plain ... you know it's just unbelievable
to me ... I'll tell you this, a Clinton-Gore
Administration is going to give you an environmental presidency to deal
with these problems. We'll be on your side for a change instead of the
side of the garbage generators, the way [previous presidents] have been."
-- Vice Presidential candidate Al Gore, July 1992, campaigning near East Liverpool, Ohio

"Until all questions concerning compliance
with state and federal law have been answered, it doesn't make sense
to grant any permit,"
-- Vice President-elect Al Gore, December 7, 1992

(WTI was turned on in March 1993 and continues to operate to this day.)

www.truthmove.org/forum/topic/733It just seems hard for a lot of people to understand that Gore is not necessarily to be trusted, but most of what he's saying about global warming is true (in the general sense). Environmental issues are real, they're not an elite globalist hoax. But career establishment politicians like Gore are probably not going to give an honest and full account of what's going on and what should be done about it.

“I have become very impatient with my own tendency to put a finger to the political winds and proceed cautiously…[E]very time I pause to consider whether I have gone too far out on limb, I look at the new facts that continue to pour in from around the world and conclude that I have not gone far enough…[T]he time has long since come to take more political risks -- and endure more political criticism -- by proposing tougher, more effective solutions and fighting for their enactments.”
-- Al Gore, Earth in the Balance

"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."
-- Edward Abbey

related pages:

Hillary Clinton worked for WTI's funder Jackson Stephens and was on the Board of Directors
of LaFarge toxic waste incinerator

The real issue is how and why the industrial
system we are all a part of was unwilling and unable to make even modest
shifts away toward efficiency (let alone toward sustainability).

Beyond the Nobel Prize

The musician Tom Lehrer is rumored to have said he stopped writing satirical songs after Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize, because he supposedly couldn't think of anything funnier than this. In reality, Lehrer stopped performing several years before Kissinger was given the Peace Prize for War (1973), but it is still a good joke. Perhaps it is worth remembering that Mr. Nobel made his fortune through the invention of dynamite, a safe and stable means of handling nitroglycerine -- and Nobel thought that his new explosive would make war so terrible that it would no longer be feasible.

The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize award to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is - like most political decisions - very bittersweet. Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" has a lot of good science in it but glosses over his own history of helping make the problems of pollution worse. Gore also shies away from the decentralized solutions that would be needed for a serious, civilization wide effort to address a destabilized climate. In other words, the political elites, corporations and the military industrial complex would have to be converted to use these resources to implement relocalized food production, decentralized renewable energy systems and other efforts that distribute power away from stratified hierarchies.

It is likely the Nobel Committee partially chose to give the award to Gore to annoy the Bush regime, similar to their award of the 2002 Peace Prize to Jimmy Carter and the 2005 Peace Prize to the International Atomic Energy Agency (which documented that Saddam Hussein's aborted nuclear weapons program had been effectively stopped before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq).

Jimmy Carter was probably the first Nobel Laureate who openly threatened a nuclear war for oil (the so-called "Carter Doctrine" unveiled in 1980 stated that the United States would use any means to control the Persian Gulf oil fields). The IAEA also is a schizophrenic organization, since it simultaneously promotes the illusion of "peaceful nuclear power" while trying to keep countries from covert development of nuclear weapons - even though any government (or corporation!) with a nuclear fuel cycle can acquire the skills to make a nuclear arsenal. The only way to prevent further nuclear proliferation is to abandon nuclear power reactors in favor of decentralized, non-toxic renewable energy.

The 2004 and 2006 recipients are very different from Gore, Carter and the IAEA. The 2004 recipient was Wangaari Mathaai, founder of the Greenbelt Movement in Kenya. Mathaai suffered great personal risks and violent attacks to challenge the Kenyan dictatorship for many years, and now is a member of parliament. The 2006 recipient was Mohammed Yunis of Bangladesh, founder of the Grameen Bank (a microfinance development effort that makes small loans to the poor to lift them out of extreme poverty, not focused on merely making profits for centralized financial systems. These movements are parts of the social shifts toward a peaceful world that are less directly connected to overt warfare, diplomacy and peace conferences -- but a clean environment that sustains life, democracy and an end to severe poverty are all prerequisites to a world without war.

Two awards that are more grassroots are the Right Livelihood Award and the Goldman Prize.

The Right Livelihood Award has been called "the alternative Nobel Prize." This year's award recipients include a farmer who has stood up to the biotechnology giant Monsanto. There were very few genetically tampered crops in 1993 when Clinton and Gore entered the White House.

"Agricultural biotechnology will find a supporter occupying the White House next year, regardless of which candidate wins the election in November..." Monsanto's electronic newsletter www.monsanto.com Oct. 6, 2000

"... for their courage in defending biodiversity and farmers' rights, and challenging the environmental and moral perversity of current interpretations of patent laws".

With their fight against Monsanto's abusive marketing practices, Percy and Louise Schmeiser have given the world a wake-up call about the dangers to farmers and biodiversity everywhere from the growing dominance and market aggression of companies engaged in the genetic engineering of crops.

The Goldman Prize is probably the most prestigious environmental award on planet Earth. One of the recipients of this honor has spend years fighting an environmental disaster that Al Gore promised to block as a Vice Presidential candidate, but refused to stop once in the White House. The main financier behind the WTI toxic waste incinerator - Jackson Stephens of Arkansas - financed Governor Clinton's campaign for President, the Clinton campaign kept some of its money in his bank, and Hillary Clinton worked for Stephens while at the Rose law firm (she reportedly helped incorporate the WTI incinerator and also served on the Board of Directors of LaFarge Cement, an even larger hazardous waste incineration company).

Time's Up?We will always have "ten years" to solve climate crisis
Why Al Gore won't admit the time for easy mitigation is long past

A Gorey Timeline

1973: Nobel Prize awarded to Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho for allegedly stopping the War on Viet Nam. Le Duc Tho declined to accept the prize since the war was still underway.

1979: Representative Al Gore votes to exempt the Snail Darter from the Endangered Species Act (a law signed by President Nixon) to get the Tellico Dam built in Tennessee.

1980: Jimmy Carter implicitly threatens nuclear war over Persian Gulf oil fields (the "Carter Doctrine"). Despite this, the shadow government undermined Carter's re-election campaign via a secret deal with the Iranian government to delay the release of the US Embassy hostages until after the election (the "October Surprise").

1989: Senator Gore writes about the ozone layer destruction that "We cannot afford to wait another 15 years to clean it up."

1990: United Nations Environmental Program warns we have a decade to address the environmental crisis. Smithsonian Institution's Thomas Lovejoy and ocean expert Jacques Cousteau make similar warnings.

1992: Union of Concerned Scientists World Scientists' Warning to Humanity states "no more than one or a few more decades remain before the chance to avert the threats we now confront will be lost."

1992: Al Gore published "Earth in the Balance," which states "Modern industrial civilization, as presently organized, is
colliding violently with our planet's ecological system. .... we must
take bold and unequivocal action: we must make the rescue of the environment
the central organizing principle for civilization."

1992: Al Gore elected Vice President, first promise after election is to block the opening of the Waste Technologies Industries (WTI) toxic waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio.

1994: Clinton / Gore administration declines to promote environmental agenda while Democrats control both houses of Congress. A bill to protect the largest private old growth redwood forest passes overwhelmingly in the House, but is blocked by Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA) in the Senate. This bill would have protected all six old growth groves in the "Headwaters" forest, about 40,000 acres of second growth and clearcuts, and had money to hire unemployed loggers for reforestation and restoration.

1996 (August 3): Clinton signed away Delaney Clause, a regulation enacted by the Eisenhower Administration that banned carcinogenic food additives and required safety testing for new additives. This was a goal of the Reagan / Bush administration, but the environmental groups fought that roll-back when the Republicans controlled the White House. The Natural Resources Defense Council helped enable the Clinton / Gore elimination of this food safety protection standard.

1996: Before the election, Clinton / Gore made a deal with Charles Hurwitz, the corporate raider who owned Headwaters Forest (via his buy out of the Pacific Lumber Company). The Clinton/Gore Headwaters deal only protected two of the six old growth groves, a few thousand acres of buffer around the old forest, and no money for reforestation and restoration. Pacific Lumber was granted exemptions to environmental laws to destroy the rest of "their" forest.

1997: Vice President Al Gore attends Kyoto Treaty negotiations, refuses to push the United States to enact requirements to reduce pollutants.

1998: Clinton / Gore open up the Naval Petroleum Reserve on the Alaska North Slope to oil extraction (just west of Prudhoe Bay). Clinton/Gore pass the "TEA-21" transportation bill, the largest expansion of the interstate highway system since Eisenhower.

2001: Vice President Al Gore tells Congressional Democrats not to challenge fraudulent "Electors" from Florida, endorses the Bush / Cheney coup d'etat. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus dispute legitimacy of Florida Electors, but fail to attract a single Senator to co-sponsor their objection, so no debate about the fraud takes place.

2005: Department of Energy contracted "Hirsch Report" states industrial civilization would need two decades to be able to mitigate the impacts of Peak Oil. 2005 was the peak for "conventional" oil. In other words, despite his many flaws, Jimmy Carter was right - but the elites who run the show did not allow him to cope with the energy crisis.

2006: Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth" states "we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe" from climate change. The film barely mentions his energy policies as Vice President.

Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of
the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to
avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet
into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods,
droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever
experienced. (2006)

Senator Al Gore, February 1989

"It took us 15 years to see what we have done to the atmosphere. We cannot afford to wait another 15 years to clean it up."
-- foreword to Sharon L. Roan, "Ozone Crisis: The 15 Year Evolution of a Sudden Global Emergency," John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1989

Senator Al Gore, January 1992

The integrity of the environment is not just another issue
to be used in political games for popularity, votes, or attention. And
the time has long since come to take more political risks -- and endure
much more political criticism -- by proposing tougher, more effective
solutions and fighting hard for their enactment. ....

Modern industrial civilization, as presently organized, is
colliding violently with our planet's ecological system. .... we must
take bold and unequivocal action: we must make the rescue of the environment
the central organizing principle for civilization.
-- Al Gore, Jr., Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit,
(New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1992, p. 269)

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3412657607654281729&q=tvshow%3ACharlie_RoseAl Gore on the Charlie Rose Show - June 19, 2006"on details you will find a range of opinion,
around the edges ... but not on the main consensus. The debate's over.
The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming
are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing
was staged in a movie lot in Arizona."

The Tenth Edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines greenwash (n) as "Disinformation disseminated by an organisation so as to present
an environmentally responsible public image. Derivatives greenwashing.
Origin from green on the pattern of whitewash."

www.alternet.org/envirohealth/46318/
What Al Gore Hasn't Told You About Global Warming
By David Morris
Tuesday 09 January 2007
George Monbiot's new book "Heat" picks up where Al Gore left
off on global warming, offering real solutions without sugar-coating the
large personal sacrifices they will require.

The Source of Hopelessness
A Review of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth

The day after 9-11, a person whom I respect and care about a great deal said to me, "George Bush was anointed by God for a time such as this." He then asked me what I thought. I said that I thought that the Bush family was anointed by financial fraud, narcotics trafficking, and pedophilia. Stunned, he said, "If that is true, then it's hopeless." I replied that things were far from hopeless, but that for me solutions started with faith in a divine intelligence rather than affirming a dependent relationship with organized crime.

Last week I had dinner with a wonderful couple -- activists in the San Francisco Bay Area-- and the woman told me how wonderful she thought Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth was. She then asked for my opinion. When I gave it, she said, "If that is true, then it's hopeless." We then proceeded to have a rich conversation about why folks who used to call themselves “liberal” or “progressive” are in the same trap as folks who use to call themselves “conservative"

In order to respond to the problem of global warming, it is necessary to look at the ways that we as citizens support criminal activity by our government and how we as consumers, depositors and investors support the private banking, corporate and investment interests that run our government in this manner. This is easier said than done. When we ‘get it’ – i.e., that we have to withdraw from a co-dependent relationship with organized crime in order to save and rebuild our world – we can find ourselves struggling to envision the system-wide actions that are needed and feeling overwhelmed by the task of determining how to go about them personally and in collaboration with others.

My nickname for our current economic system is “The Tapeworm.” For decades I have listened to Americans from all walks of life insist that we must find solutions within the system – i.e. within the socially acceptable boundaries laid down by the Tapeworm. Believing that our solutions for addressing global warming lie within the system defined by the Tapeworm goes hand in hand with obtaining our media from companies controlled by the Tapeworm, and having to choose from among leaders anointed by the Tapeworm, such as Al Gore. This belief is, in fact, the source of our hopelessness. George Orwell once said that omission is the greatest form of lie. Gore's omissions in An Inconvenient Truth are so extraordinary that it is hard to know where to start. Watching An Inconvenient Truth is more useful for understanding how propaganda is made and used than for understanding the risks of global warming (I am not qualified to judge the scientific evidence here -- I am assuming that Gore's presentation on global warming is sound).

The fundamental lie that Al Gore is telling comes from defining our problem as environmental -- in this case global warming, whereas our environmental problems -- as real and important as they are -- are but a symptom of the problem, not the problem. Gore defines our problem as "what." He is silent on "who." For example, Gore does not ask or answer:

Who is doing this?

Who has been governing our planet this way and why?

Cui bono? Who benefits?

Who has suppressed alternative technologies resulting in our dependency on fossil fuels? Why?

Who has how much financial capital generated from this damage?

How did things get this bad without our changing? How much was related to fear of and dirty tricks of those in charge?

How do we recapture resources that have been criminally drained and use them to invest in restoring environmental balance?

Utah Phillips once said, "The earth is not dying. It is being killed, and the people killing it have names and addresses." In one sentence, Utah Phillips told us more about global warming than Al Gore has told us in a lifetime of writing and speaking, let alone in An Inconvenient Truth.

Needless to say, Gore offers no names and addresses. Gore's "who" discussion is limited to population. He seems to imply that the issue is the growth in population combined with busy people being shortsighted, leading to some giant incompetency "accident." That makes it easy to avoid digging into the areas that would naturally follow from starting with "who" – which should lead to dissecting the relationship between environmental deterioration and the prevailing global investment model that is such a critical part of the governance infrastructure and incentive systems.

Gore walks us through timelines showing the global warming of temperatures. By defining the problem as simply environmental damage, and shrinking the history down to temperatures, there is no need to correlate environmental deterioration with the growth of the global financial system and the resulting centralization of economic and political power. The planet is being run by people who are intentionally killing it. Their power is their ability to offer all of us ways of making money by helping them kill it. Hence, understanding how the mechanics of the financial system and the accumulation of financial capital relate to environmental destruction is essential. If we integrate these deeper systems into an historical timeline, authentic solutions will begin to emerge. But Gore omits the deeper systems and the lessons of how we got here and in so doing closes the door on transformation.

The Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is an amendment to the international treaty on climate change, assigning mandatory emission limitations for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to the signatory nations. The objective of the protocol is the “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

The United States, the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, did not ratify the protocol. On November 12, 1998, Vice President Al Gore symbolically signed the protocol. “Signing the Protocol, while an important step forward, imposes no obligations on the United States. The Protocol becomes binding only with the advice and consent of the US Senate,” Gore said at the time. “As we have said before, we will not submit the Protocol for ratification without the meaningful participation of key developing countries in efforts to address climate change.”

In September of 2000, China was granted “Permanent Normal Trading Relations” with the United States when President Clinton signed it into law.

Earlier in the year, in a foreign policy speech delivered to the International Press Institute in Boston, Gore stressed that China and Russia should not be viewed as enemies but as “vital partners.” The vice president also said that America has a vital interest in promoting its own economic prosperity throughout the world. “We need to promote the stable flow of investment around the world,” he said. During his speech, no mention was made of promoting minimum environmental standards among America’s new “vital partners”.

Since then, companies operating in China have been notorious for their low environmental and labor standards – among the worst in the world. Pollution is rampant. China is second only to the United States in its greenhouse gas emissions and is now building on average one coal-fired power plant every week! China is considered a “developing” country, and as such is not required to reduce carbon emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

After reviewing the actions, and inaction, of the Clinton-Gore administration, it is hard to believe that it is the same Al Gore featured in the documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth”.

The Sierra Club accelerated its plunge to environmental irrelevancy, firmly cementing its role as Democratic Party lapdog by awarding its highest award, the John Muir Award, to Carbon Off-set magnate, Al Gore, Jr.

Silly me – I went into “An Inconvenient Truth” expecting a serious, provocative documentary on the damage created by global warming. Instead, I got a 96-minute commercial on the deification of Al Gore. Talk about a bait-and-switch!

Yes, the man who (in his words) used to be the next President of the United States is now on the big screen in this self-serving slop where he hosts a slide show lecture on how global warming occurs and what it is doing to the planet. Looking like a corpulent Zeppo Marx and displaying all of the lethargic personality that repeatedly underwhelmed the American voters, Gore’s lecture is among the least riveting stand-up routines to play the lecture circuit. If that’s not bad enough, all of the facts presented in this lecture have been reported widely before and there is not one iota of new information in this offering.

What is here, however, is the constant reminder of what a great man Al Gore is supposed to be. We get endless diversions into selected chapters of his biography, where he exploits family tragedies to show how sympathetic he is to the suffering of others (although his sister’s cigarette-fueled death from lung cancer and his son’s auto accident don’t relate to the ecological message). We see Gore looking very serious as he is tapping away on his laptop (the Apple logo is prominently displayed throughout the film), and we see him have supposedly serious discussions with Chinese scientists on their country’s pollution. There are also the obligatory (and, admittedly, deserved) potshots against Ronald Reagan and both Bush presidencies.

What is missing from “An Inconvenient Truth” is the inconvenient truth that global warming actually accelerated during the 1990s, when Gore was the number two man in the Clinton White House. The film also omits that the U.S. auto industry (including the auto workers union) have repeatedly and successfully fought against energy standards during the 1990s – and that Clinton and Gore never forced them to acquiesce since they were profiting from their financial campaign contributions. [emphasis added]

An
Inconvenient Truth:
Gore made the problem worse while Vice President

Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," raises the issue
of global warming in a way that scares the bejeezus out of viewers,
as it should since the consequences of global climate change are truly
earth-shaking. The former Vice-President does a good job of presenting
the graphic evidence, exquisite and terrifying pictures that document
the melting of the polar ice caps and the effects on other species,
new diseases, and rising ocean levels.
But, typically, the solutions Gore offers are standard Democratic Party
fare. You'd never know by watching this film that Gore and Clinton ran
this country for 8 years and that their policies -- as much as those
of the Bush regime -- helped pave the way for the crisis we face today.

From September 1992

The Election and the Environment - for Baltimore Resources

By MARK ROBINOWITZ

The most crucial issue facing humanity is the accelerating destruction
of the environment. We are causing a mass extinction of life on Earth
unprecedented since the end of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Enough
toxic and nuclear wastes have been created to poison all life, and our
pollution is changing our planet's atmosphere.

Humanity seems to have averted global nuclear war only to more slowly
ruin the Earth.

Here in Maryland, cancer and pollution are at record levels, our forests
are clearcut for paper, roads and shopping malls, and politicians are
unwilling to consider changes beyond token mentions of "recycling."

Could a democratic victory change our seemingly suicidal course? President
Bush's policies have been an environmental disaster. The last 12 years
have seen massive military spending, virtual elimination of efficiency
and renewable energy programs, gutting of health, safety and the environmental
regulations, and anti-environmentalists appointed as corporate watchdogs.
Bush's energy policy promotes coal and oil burning, opposes modest auto
efficiency standards, and is trying to revive nuclear power. His few accomplishments,
such as the so-called Clean Air Act, were watered down to near uselessness.
The White House is stonewalling on global warming and other severe threats,
incurring international wrath.

Vice President J. Danforth Quayle inherited the White House effort to
gut environmental, health and safety regulations from Bush. His Council
on Competitiveness meets in secret to overturn laws that impact on corporate
greed. Quayle has shown no understanding of any environmental issue.

Senator Albert Gore, Jr. is the only candidate on the ballot who is an
environmentalist. His recent book "Earth in the Balance" displays
a profound understanding of global warming, ozone depletion and other
crises. He states that "Modern industrial civilization, as presently
organized, is colliding violently with our planet's ecological system.
.... I have come to believe that we must take bold and unequivocal action:
we must make the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle
for civilization."

Gore is the most informed environmentalist in Congress. Unfortunately,
he is a professional politician who supported the invasion of Grenada,
the mass murder of more than 200,000 Iraqis, the MX missile, the Stealth
B-2 bomber and advocates continued research on nuclear power even while
acknowledging the need for solar energy

Gov. Bill Clinton's environmental record in Arkansas can best be described
as inconsistent. During his first term, he tried to enforce strict pollution
standards on the state's paper mills, but his determination evaporated
under the corporate backlash. He doled out huge tax breaks to polluters
such as International Paper (which could only find $10 million to take
of an offered $29 million handout). Clinton advocates a moratorium on
logging remaining old growth forests and a national bottle bill, but not
a total transformation to phase out fossil fuels and create a sustainable
society.

[note: old growth logging on northwest National Forests, frozen by
a 1992 legal moratorium, resumed in 1992 under Clinton/Gore. Campaign
pledges for the national bottle bill were quickly forgotten once in
the White House.]

The election is very important for some issues and irrelevant for others.
Clinton-Gore would make a difference regarding the banning of ozone-layer
eating substances, increased support for renewable energy, and a sweeping
change in the top management of federal regulatory agencies. However,
the Democrats are unlikely to make deep cuts in military spending (the
US military is the world's top polluter) to fund social and environmental
programs, let alone stop corporations from destroying the planet. A Clinton-Gore
administration would merely slow down the rate that we approach the precipice,
not completely reverse course. But even if they would want to "take
bold and unequivocal action," it would be very difficult to implement
serious change resisted by the bureaucracy and corporations without massive
public support.

[note: the Clinton/Gore administration did not speed up action on the
ozone layer, and let DuPont shift from CFCs/H-CFCs to polluting HFCs
instead of requiring non-toxic alternatives]

Hunter S. Thompson: "A Democratic victory would not change the world,
but it would at least slow the berserk white-trash momentum of the bombs-and-Jesus
crowd. Those people have had their way long enough. Not even the Book
of Revelation threatens a plague of vengeful yahoos. We all need a rest
from this pogrom." (1986)

In 1956, the Interstate Highway Act was signed by President Dwight Eisenhower.
Its chief Senate sponsor was Albert Gore Sr., but the man most responsible
for its passage was Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, a powerful
friend of the road building industry. It was Johnson who pushed hard for
the dominant 90 percent federal cost share.

SUVs instead of fuel efficiency standards

gutting of utility efficiency programs ("energy deregulation" lead to the Enron scandals)

At April 25, 2006 3:30 PM, Greenwashing Al Gore said...
My first reaction is to say "only Wired" could do an article
on Al Gore reinvented as environmentalist, with not one mention of the
Gore family's ownership in Occidental Petroleum. But then again, most
US media whore for the political elite.
I love the part about Al and Tipper's endless vacations: flying about
the globe, burning tons of fossil fuels, obsessing about global warming.
The advertisement for Gore's Current TV ignores his involvement in the
destruction of Newsworld International. NWI broadcast the Canadian news
from the CBC, and newscasts from dozens of countries, with translations
when necessary. It was carried by many satellite providers, bringing a
much needed balance to America's corporate-agenda-driven news. The mighty
vision of Gore wiped NWI from the map, replaced by Current TV, a product
placement factory cleverly disguised as a news 'zine for young adults.
Once again, technology to the rescue: "using the power of technology
to save the world." Neat. We'll burn a bunch of fossil fuels manufacturing
our new technological products to save us from burning a bunch of fossil
fuels. What vision!
Try planting a tree, riding a bike, and recycling for starters.

At April 25, 2006 6:09 PM, Greenwashing Al Gore said...
Gore sure has a lot of loose ca$h to spend on all his pet projects. This
sweetheart government deal with Gore'$ Occidental Petroleum must have
lined those pockets: a $3.65 billion sale of the U.S. Elk Hills Naval
Petroleum Reserve to Occidental, while Gore was VP. The reserve produces
over 20 million barrels of oil per year. Given today's oil prices, the
reserve could pay for itself in a little over 2 years (not including its
natural gas production). The U.S. government sure knows how to give away
billion$ to billionaire$. An especially timely giveaway, when one realizes
the U.S. government is now seeking to increase its Strategic
Petroleum Reserve.
Redux: federal government sells Elk Hills for $3.65 billion to reduce
the national debt. At $100 a barrel, it will pay $10 billion over 5 years
if Gore's Occidental supplies all the oil to replenish the 100 million
barrels withdrawn from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Net loss $6.35
billion. Little wonder why Social Security is on the ropes.
What's Al's real motivation? Is he holding lots of low-lying coastal property
in Florida or something?

At April 26, 2006 11:06 PM, Bud McSpud said...
Is this the same Al Gore who lobbied for 'Plan Colombia'*?
*(A central feature of which has been the dumping RoundUp herbicide all
over hundreds of thousands of acres of Colombian rain forest.)

a reasonably accurate account of the many problems with Gore's environmental record, written after the 1996 re-election (and long before the 2000 campaign), so the Sierra Club presumably felt more able to be honest without an imminent election. (The Sierra Club did not stress these facts as the Bush / Gore campaign unfolded.)

... The most troublesome conflict for Gore is, ironically, global warming, a subject on which he is regularly briefed by the nation's leading climatologists, and which he has mastered at least as thoroughly as he did nuclear disarmament in the 1980s. In addition, Gore has criticized in the strongest possible terms those who would take half measures. "Today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin," he wrote in Earth in the Balance. "How much more evidence is needed by the body politic to justify taking vigorous action?"

Environmentalists might well ask that question of the Clinton/Gore administration, whose efforts to slow global climate change have been anything but vigorous. The single biggest step the White House could take to reduce global warming would be to mandate stricter standards for fuel efficiency of cars and trucks. "It makes little sense to continue manufacturing cars and trucks that get 20 miles per gallon and pump 19 pounds of [CO.sub.2] into the atmosphere per gallon," Gore once wrote. Yet the administration has stubbornly resisted raising auto fuel-efficiency standards, even when it had the unilateral power to do so. As part of its War on the Environment, the 104th Congress revoked that power last year, and a new bill to take it away permanently has not been contested by the White House.

Katie McGinty, head of the Council on Environmental Quality, describes efforts to increase fuel economy as "tilting at windmills." The vice president's favored solution, she says, is the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, a joint program with the Big Three automakers that commits them to "their absolute best efforts" to produce a commercially viable, fuel-efficient vehicle. But the partnership only requires them to produce a single prototype by 2006, and there's no penalty for failure.

"Gore's vivid language in describing environmental problems is almost never matched by equally passionate advocacy for a solution," writes reporter Timothy Noah in U.S. News and World Report, "particularly when powerful economic interests are at stake. Conservative critics who brand Gore an 'ozone man' have it wrong. On the environment, Gore favors extreme rhetoric but only incremental solutions."